Modeling Desert Juniper Trees | Workbench Wednesday

[Music] hiy folks Dave here at Thunder Mesa Studio on a workbench Wednesday hope you're having a great day whenever and wherever you happen to be watching this the other day I posted a photo on my social media of a juniper tree that I had removed from the Hanging Rock section and was you know transplanting it over to the O8 Bandit Canyon Railway uh I'm in the midst of taking Hanging Rock apart for uh Thunder Mesa 2.0 so some of those things are getting recycled onto the Bandit Canyon Railway layout others will find their way onto the new sections of the Thunder Mesa layout but anyway people saw that a couple of people asked if I was going to do a tutorial on making those kind of trees making juniper trees like that and I thought you know that is a great topic for a workbench Wednesday so that is what we're going to do today these kind of juniper trees grow all over the Southwest here uh between elevations of about 4500 and 7,000 feet or so uh you'll find them in Sedona you find them in the south rim of the Grand Canyon they're all over Utah in fact one of the most common varieties is known as a Utah Juniper and that's kind of what we're going to be modeling today the early settlers called them Cedars you'll find places like Cedar brakes or Cedar Ridge or Cedar Mesa named after this tree even though they are not Cedars I can understand why they thought they were Cedars though because the wood smells exactly like Cedar when you split it anyway that's not Germaine to our discussion today today we're going to be making one of these trees because there are really no commercial products out there available to model these trees accurately and so you kind of have to build them from scratch and even though what I'm making today is a juniper tree you could use the same techniques for building any kind of old Twisted garl tree could be an oak could be an apple tree you know that's up to you so without any further Ado let's take a look at the materials we're going to be using today and get started on the project so here on the workbench I have everything gathered that I think I'm going to need to make a tree today first off I have a bamb blue skewer a nice pointy end down here I have some braided picture wire that I picked up down at the local hardware store and if you buy this stuff make sure you get the uncoated kind it comes two ways you can get them coated in plastic which is easier on your hands but very difficult to uh make a tree out of so you want to get the uncoated kind then I have some Woodland scenix dark green Evergreen foliage clumps this is the kind kind of ground foam that uh clumps together like that that's kind of what you want and I have some uh acrylic modeling paste this is an artistic medium um basically it has the same Foundation as acrylic paint but it's much much thicker so you can build it up in layers and actually use it to model things with you can you can kind of sculpt with it and I will put a link uh in the video description down below where you can pick this stuff up uh you don't need anywhere near this much by the way and then I've got some paint I've got some Rustoleum dark brown camo and a couple of different shades of uh Apple Barrel craft acrylics some territorial beige and some granite gray and I think that's probably about all we're going to need oops almost forgot going to need some uh een tacky glue too or something similar to glue the foliage clumps onto the tree Armature once it's finished Utah junipers are a a low growing tree you know you're only going to find them that they're going to be 16 to maybe 20 feet tall at the top tallest so that's you know four to five inches in O scale and by the way an O scale tree is what we're going to be making today so if you want to build one of these in a smaller scale it's all the same steps you just make it shorter you know uh the first thing we want to do is cut a few strands of this picture wire we want a few strands that are about probably 8 Ines long because this is going to make up both the the trunk and the branches of this find my wire cutters here be really careful when you're working with this stuff it's it's really easy to you know poke holes in into your fingers so take take some care so I'm going to cut probably four or five strands we're modeling a old juniper tree today too by the way when they're young they're just kind of clumpy bushes but when they get old um they get all kind of Twisted and gnarled and sometimes look like they're half dead with some branches that are completely bare and then other parts of the tree that are you know still very much alive those are the really interesting ones you can model the uh you know the the young clumpy ones with just some clumps of foliage or you can use the uh the Woodland scenix armatures for small deciduous trees those will work so on my bamboo skewer I want about an inch of it sticking down underneath and this is just going to be for planting it on the layout and then I'm going to start with my uh one of my strands of wire and start twisting this around you want to twist it pretty tightly around here you get a nice snug fit on there and you notice I've left some down here sticking out what you want here is you want some pieces that are sticking out up here for branches and then you want some shorter pieces down at the bottom which can represent Roots these roots will spread out along the ground kind of you know look like fingers going into the ground now that I've got that about that tall I want to cut this bamboo skewer right there because we want a twisted tree if we wanted a straight tree you could you know have the bamboo skewer go all the way up and uh do the same thing again with the next piece of wire wind that around and then when we get to the end of the bamboo skewer we're going to continue to wind but we're going to go around around that earlier piece of wire we can even start to think about what shape this is going to be if you're if you're stuck you know look at photos will really help you out so now I'm going to go another actually I'm going to go one more down here at the bottom because I don't want it to be too thick at the bottom this is about as thick as I want the bottom part of the trunk to be with the next one I want to start up here at the top you know beyond where that bamboo skew is because I want to thicken this part up I'm wrapping this pretty tight you don't want to have you don't want to see uh air in between you want to wrap this this pretty tight remember you want some short branches too you know where maybe things have broken off a lot of times these trees will split like right above this thicker part of the trunk and you'll get one you know half one arm going off one way and then you'll get another arm going off in the opposite direction and this can be the result of you know drought or sometimes a lightning strike these trees live a really long time so they they go through quite a lot I've already gone through my original five pieces of wire so I'm going to cut a little bit more it's because I want to uh beef this one up so what we're creating here this is a this is what's known as an Armature so it's going to remain flexible once you get this to the shape that you want then you can go and start pulling the ends apart basically unbraiding the braided wire down at the ends to create smaller branches and this is why we use braided wire because this is going to add a lot of realism or maybe I should say believability to the model when it's done all these fine branches just be really careful when you do this uh I would be wearing gloves but the truth is these little wires will go right through even like leather gloves so you just have to take a lot of care you could use pliers which would probably be smart to pull these apart once you pull them out you kind of you know twist them around so they're going in all different directions now I like to use a little block of foam just push that bamboo skewer right down inside you can spread the roots out a little bit too down here but mostly that part of the root would be underground so don't get too carried away like you do on the branches and now I want to cover the entire thing from top to bottom with acrylic modeling paste I'm using a soft brush and just kind of dabbing it on and it'll probably take a couple of coats so you know this is not um this is not a fast way to make trees I did a I did a video on 10minute trees that used um Sage Brush for the Trunks and those were fast they really were you know I think they were less than 10 minutes these take a little bit longer these are accent trees I guess you would say or foreground trees some people might call them and fortunately if you're modeling High Desert scenery like I am they tend to grow you know there's not a lot of them it's not not like you have to make a huge Forest of them you make five or six or 10 or whatever you need when you get out to the ends of these branches just kind of and then you can kind of brush it on just get a you know just get a a coating on the top of them you don't want to build it up in clumps out at the ends because that kind of defeats the whole purpose of uh having those fine branches Little Critter hole created there where these two branches cross I like that that's that's what old Bob Ross would call a happy accident you know maybe there's a little bird or squirrel or something that lives in there happy little tree if I was going to make a whole bunch of these I would do them all at the same time kind of assembly line fashion that way you know this stuff would be in the paint and the glue that would all be dry at the same time so you could just move through them bang bang bang you know but I think that's looking pretty good we're going to let that uh dry overnight and see what we got now that that's had a chance to dry completely overnight I'm going to come in with a second coat this time I'm using kind of a stiff brush because I want brush Strokes in there can you see that kind of going upward like this and creating the look of bark texture particularly on this uh trunk down here towards the bottom doesn't matter as much up on the branches but down here I really want that kind of grooved texture like that so we'll apply this coat it's not as thick as the first coat I'm going to put this on and let it dry for a couple hours well a couple hours later and I think we're ready to get some paint on this now and the first color I want to put on is this uh Rustoleum enamel dark brown camo just going to get an even coat over the whole thing and that'll be our base color all right that's dry to the touch now so I'm going to squeeze out some of this territorial beige and some of this granite gray and I'm going to start dry brushing these colors on always like to have a piece of corrugated cardboard standing by to wipe the ex says paint off my brush just going to start going down and trying to bring out that uh bark detail that I put in with the modeling paste these uh these juniper trees are you know they can vary the older they get the kind of grayer they get you know in entire portions of the tree can look like they're dead um so they get very kind of gray or silvery looking and that's kind of the the look I'm going for on here get a grayer out towards the uh the tips of some of these branches that lighter gray and it's interesting how if you do a bunch of these trees how they all start to kind of take on personalities of their own and you can vary the shades of brown you could make you know some more red some more gray some more light tan variation is what it's all about when uh trying to replicate nature it's you don't want a bunch of uniform looking trees they should all be a little bit different now start putting the foliage on I'm using this uh once again I'm using this Woodland scenix dark green Clump foliage Evergreen um I wouldn't attempt to try to model uh needles at this scale juniper trees don't have needles anyway they have something called scales which are really they're like proton needles from from the age of you know before the time of the dinosaurs um but if you wanted to try to model those you might try it in uh you know 124 or one of the larger scales like that using some een tacky glue here out on the ends of the branches not all of the foliage you put on is going to stay some of it's going to fall off and that's just fine foliage falls off real trees all the time looks good if you try to you know work it down in between these branches gives it a more more natural look this looks like it should be dead right there I'm going to leave that not put any foliage on that one thing I found that looks really good is to leave U some of the branches like sticking out above the foliage that gives a very natural look and I can't stress enough that it's really important when modeling you know any kind of tree to continue turning it around like I'm doing here so you want to you want to be looking at it from all sides not just like one side it's kind of like decorating a Christmas tree you don't want to end up with all the decorations on one side and have it blank on the other side so keep turning it all the time I just need to release this from the styrofoam that U acrylic modeling paste is a great glue glued it right to here which is fine all right that tree is ready to plant on the layout I just need to find a good spot for it and I think this is a pretty good spot right here by the Sundance mine this is kind of a one of the larger trees so I want it to be lower down have the smaller trees higher up looks better that way and you know it's a little bit of forc perspective and I can kind of Bend these roots down push them down into the foam I'll fill in around the base of it little bit of real Red Dirt that I picked up over near Sedona make this tree look like it's been here for a thousand years Mist that with a little wet water dribble on a little bit of diluted white glue to hold that dirt in place trees like this often shelter smaller plants weeds and yuckers and things like that grow up underneath them and that's one of the things that will make a scene like this look believable and natural not just have the tree all there by itself but have some things growing around it underneath it you'll often find a lot of downed limbs around an old tree like this this too so I've got some little twigs and these are just off of a a real pine tree that's growing outside but they match rather well last I'll add a few little real rocks here and there too that gives us a whole little high desert mini scene which is you know a little more than i' planed to do today but that's okay I want to thank those of you that suggested I do a tutorial on making these high desert juniper trees it was a lot of fun for me to do this is one of my favorite trees they grow all over the hills and canyons out here in the southwest they're a lot of fun to model I really enjoyed it hope you enjoyed the video too and got something good out of it you can like subscribe share hit that notification Bell to see more from Thunder Maes Studio you can also follow Thunder Mesa over on Instagram at thunder. 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